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Roman church decorated with 4k skeletons

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: Roman church decorated with 4k skeletons

#111

A great many people are incredibly uncomfortable with the idea of death, and installations like this, and similar works of art, are a great antidote. Accepting death as the price of life might be a bit difficult for people raised in a culture that worships perpetual youth and which dreams of immortality, perhaps in the form of a digital silicon upload, but it's really a sign of maturity. Taking a minute or so out of…

"Who promised you tomorrow?" - St. Alphonsus Liguori, Preparation for Death

Being born is a death sentence.

Re: Roman church decorated with 4k skeletons

#112
post #100
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some ways, the 10000+ previous days of my life are a fairly reasonable promise of tomorrow.

Gambler's fallacy

In a randomly sampled million individuals, what's the probability of any of them surviving another day?

The gambler fallacy talks about a gambler who has won and believes that the cause that made him win is long lasting. But a living man is right to believe that he is alive due to forces that have a lot of momentum and won't vanish suddenly. The fallacy would be assuming that the man is exempt from accidents, that are unpredictable.

Re: Roman church decorated with 4k skeletons

#113
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And for those who aren’t Catholic, or any religion or spirituality that doesn’t have this interpretation?

Do you mean, for example: https://blogs.icrc.org/law-and-policy/2018/11/01/respect-for... > "Respect for dead bodies manifests itself in diverse ways in different cultures around the world.In Islamic law and Muslim cultures, burying the dead in the ground is the correct way to respect dead bodies. Cremation is prohibited under Islamic law because, unlike in some cultures, it is considered a violation of the dignity o…

A stable society stands on a set of shared principles, not on blind respect of each other traditions, no matter what those are.

That no-cremation rule was made for a good reason, but that reason can't be explained to masses, hence the "just do what the sacred book tells you!" A dead body isn't completely dead, so it's better (more respectful, indeed) to keep it for two months, and then it can be burnt. But you can't keep the rotting corpse for so long due to diseases, so it's better to bury it, and once it's there it's silly to dig it out and burn. To skip these endless arguments, and the futile attemps to reason with common folk, the instructions are put into a sacred book.

Re: Roman church decorated with 4k skeletons

#118

A great many people are incredibly uncomfortable with the idea of death, and installations like this, and similar works of art, are a great antidote. Accepting death as the price of life might be a bit difficult for people raised in a culture that worships perpetual youth and which dreams of immortality, perhaps in the form of a digital silicon upload, but it's really a sign of maturity. Taking a minute or so out of…

"Who promised you tomorrow?" - St. Alphonsus Liguori, Preparation for Death

People were never seriously interested in extending their lives. I submit that there's a pretty easy, macabre (to most) way to go about it:

Monoclonal antigen-free body farms. Grow human bodies in labs -- farmed donor bodies -- and get good at head transplants.

This cures most cancers, most diseases, skipping the complicated molecular biology we've yet to solve for.

Literally replace your whole body as it ages. You can renew the thymus (big!), circulatory, pulmonary system, etc. It would have a rejuvenating affect on the brain. You'd probably give humans 150-year lifespans with it. Be able to run marathons in your 70's.

We'd suck at head transplants for decades (reducing patient outcomes in the initial period), but over time could probably get quite good at it. Initial patient populations could be recruited from terminal cancer patients, where the cancers have not spread to the blood or brain tissues. Survival rates would be low, and a lifetime of paralysis would likely be the penalty for the first decade or so of patients. But in time, we'd get better. Eventually to the point where it was no longer an emergency procedure, but a preventative maintenance measure.

The ancillary tech that would spring up from this would be in the BCI domain and we'd start getting good at modeling brain states. A whole industry of related organismal-level biotech advances would arise, propelling us forward like a new space age (or AI wave, to reference a current trend of advances).

There are crazy other things you could do - race and gender changes, better than natural genes and performance (VO2 max etc) enhancements, transgenic stuff, etc. Why limit ourselves to our previous limitations?

In 200 years we could conceivably move human thoughts onto silicon and stop dying. Too late for us with present day "life extension" / "health span" prognosis, so nobody is trying.

But it's "icky" and you'd get an even worse reaction than artists take to AI art or certain greens take to nuclear. The "people should die" folks raise their pitchforks, as do the incredibly religious. It's a very tough pill to swallow.

It angers me, because it's pretty low hanging fruit. You could grow bodies as vegetables without brains. Cut them off in development genetically and surgically. Innervate and artificially grow the bodies in advanced farms that keep their muscles moving, their hormones and limbic systems pumping, etc.

If I make a billion dollars I'll put everything into it. I want to live 150 years, and I want everyone else to as well. It's way more important to me than buying stuff or collecting "experiences".

As it stands, there's little point to anything we do (despite the fact none of us behave this way). Our experiences and enjoyment are short-lived dopamine hits to decaying neural networks, which on the geologic time scale, are pathetic little flashes that will never be noticed or remembered. When our brain cells bleb and desiccate, they won't remember all the good times we had or money we spent.

My perspective is we're all already dead. We may as well be holograms of our machine descendants playing out historical recreations.

Anyway, we could solve this if we put ourselves to it. I've yet to meet anyone else that's so gung-ho about it. I just think we're too early. And to this decaying neural network, it's kind of a horror to watch how others deal with the fact.

Re: Roman church decorated with 4k skeletons

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Who promised you tomorrow?" - St. Alphonsus Liguori, Preparation for Death

Being born is a death sentence.

Some would say it’s incredibly cruel to bring new life into existence for that very reason.

Re: Roman church decorated with 4k skeletons

#120

A great many people are incredibly uncomfortable with the idea of death, and installations like this, and similar works of art, are a great antidote. Accepting death as the price of life might be a bit difficult for people raised in a culture that worships perpetual youth and which dreams of immortality, perhaps in the form of a digital silicon upload, but it's really a sign of maturity. Taking a minute or so out of…

Personally, I find a lot of truth in what you say but I vehemently disagree with the premise that we should accept death as the price of life.

Of course, we need to be realistic and acknowledge that everyone living will all almost certainly die one day but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't strive for a future without death.

I think that CGP Grey's video, Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant, does a wonderful job arguing this viewpoint.

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